Tuesday, January 19, 2016

Anti-inflammatory treatment for Alzheimer’s disease?

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is an illness which inflicts irreversible damage to the human brain. It is a major cause of dementia. And there are millions of patients suffering from AD.

Several attempts have been conducted to prevent the progression of AD. There are some drugs available for AD patients. However, their effects are far from satisfactory, I think as a clinician.

Recently, some researchers reported that some inflammatory reactions were observed in the brain of AD patients. This fact imagines us that anti-inflammatory drugs can be a remedy for AD. In the UK, it was shown that a protein receptor regulating the activity of the microglia had a crucial role in the progression of AD with an experiment with mice. It is possible that this finding will be a breakthrough for the treatment of AD.

However, there have been many failures in this issue. Solanezumab is in a clinical trial, but its perspective is in the mist. Some other traditional drugs were excluded from the option of treatment for dementia.

As a joke, NSAIDs has a power of preventing AD, some physicians say. It is no more a joke now, but too serious to be ridiculed. Innovation often occurs from a tiny and silly fact. Nonetheless, careful investigation is needed to prove the clinical usefulness of the drugs for AD.